For many customers, the process of building meaningful services models in CA SOI can seem daunting. They encounter numerous challenges, such as issues with the underlying domain management layer and/or deploying multiple services with generic data sources, which leads to poor results—and even poorer adoption.
After witnessing this scenario a few times myself, some of my UK-based colleagues and I got together to find a way to make our customers’ journey along the service-driven enterprise management path easier—and more rewarding. We developed what we call the Spotlight approach, a series of four workshops that starts with a CA Services team gaining an understanding of the business significance of various services and ends with a fully configured CA Service Operations Insight (SOI) model.
For this approach to be effective (that is, enable customers to realize their vision of service-driven enterprise management), each series of workshops shines a spotlight on a single critical business service selected by the customer. You may conduct workshops for a few services in parallel, or you can do them sequentially.
The CA Services team leads four one-hour Spotlight workshops that together give a full picture of the service, from the business down to individual IT components. (As a point of information, Spotlight workshops are not designed to focus on technical debts such as component upgrades, unless they are essential to improving the service model. And any new monitoring requirements need to be acute to the service model we are building.) Here are more details about each workshop:
- Workshop 1—Business: We establish the nature of the selected service, who uses the service, its purpose and why it’s critical to the business. Attendees include a CA Services architect, the customer’s service product and/or business owners and the customer’s service catalogue owner.
- Workshop 2—Incident/Problem Management: We discuss the current health and technical makeup of the selected service. This leads to better understanding of how supporting applications fit together, what the critical access points are, and general characteristics and behavior. Attendees include a CA Services architect and the customer’s incident/problem manager and operations manager/lead.
- Workshop 3—Operations: We examine how the service and its applications are managed day to day. By understanding current methods and challenges, we can determine the best way to represent the service in CA SOI. Attendees include a CA Services architect and the customer’s operations manager/lead and lead operations technician.
- Workshop 4—Technical: A deep technical dive into the as-is state of monitoring. We use the knowledge gained here to develop technical recommendations and prerequisites required to on-board the selected service to CA SOI. We also use it to produce a project plan and estimate deployment deliverables. Attendees include a CA Services architect, CA senior consultant, and the customer’s systems engineer for monitoring tools.
Once the plan is complete, we draw up an estimate of effort and prerequisites. The next step is to execute the plan and promote the model into production.
In my experience, the Spotlight approach illuminates the customer’s path to success by maturing the customer’s monitoring capability and delivering real value quickly and effectively.
Inquiring minds want to know: What have you challenges/successes been in building meaningful services models in CA SOI? Please share your experience below.